We Happy Few Review: The game I’ve always wanted

Living up to its promise (so far).

Like everyone else who saw We Happy Few’s announcement and Gamescom trailers in 2015, I was instantly enamoured with the title. That feeling of anticipation only increased when I got my hands on the game through Xbox Game Preview.

That is, until I finished its five-minute tutorial and was then thrown into an aimless, rather directionless procedurally-generated mess.

It’s not that the gameplay or story – in which a lowly English office worker goes rogue and decides to stop taking a magical drug that makes things “right” and helps you fit in with your other drugged-out friends and family – wasn’t enjoyable, it just wasn’t what I was expecting. That tutorial sequence was captivating, well-structured and teased a mystery I was more than eager to start solving. We Happy Few’s animation style, combined with Bioshock-like UI, made me think I was getting something in the vein of an Irrational Games title, and I was crestfallen when that didn’t happen.

Now, I have something to confess: for most of this week, I mucked up my Steam client’s beta tab and was playing We Happy Few’s ‘Life in Technicolour’ update, one issued one full year ago.

“This update changes both the stealth and social conformity gameplay of We Happy Few, and contains fundamental changes to our AI,” Compulsion wrote about the update back in 2017. “The AI is rewritten to the point that this is basically a new game, and it sets the stage for significant changes to gameplay we’ll be making going forward.”

Compared to the initial Xbox Game Preview release I’d played, We Happy Few was like night and day – upon exiting the game’s tutorial and entering Wellington Wells, I had purpose and direction… even if I still found myself wandering aimlessly, clubbing citizens unfortunate enough to be on their own because I was desperate for a last bit of cloth to make a Padded Suit. While I appreciated the amount of change the game had undergone, I was still disappointed — I expected far more direction and guidance so I could figure out what was happening in this alternate version of Great Britain.

It took me most of the week to realise I wasn’t playing the game’s release version, and I’m very stupid for that. That’s because the full release has truly lived up – at least so far – to what I wanted it to be. I had an inkling of that before I left the “new” tutorial, seeing newspaper articles that provided more backstory than I’d previously experienced. I definitely knew it when I was about to leave for Wellington Wells and found a collectible mask that then played a flashback from protagonist Arthur’s past when picked up.

Getting to the surface and seeing “Quest Complete” was the icing on the cake (and the Steam Achievements sure didn’t hurt either). And to think, all this happened before I was able to follow the game’s questline and then enter a tutorial all about combat, showing me how to shove people effectively. That same ‘night and day’ feeling applies to the changes made between Technicolour and this retail release.

This is by no means a full review of We Happy Few – that’ll come soon enough now that I’m critiquing the game I’m supposed to be – but this is a whole-hearted endorsement. We Happy Few looks promising; I’m very much looking forward to continuing my journey with Arthur (and the game’s two additional protagonists). That said, I can’t help but think that early access has potentially soured the experience for those who were as excited for this game years and years ago as I was. If you’re in that group, I implore you to give the game another try — it’s certainly worth reconsidering.

Stay tuned for our full review after we complete the retail version of We Happy Few, which will be updated in time and remain at this very URL.